The barman handed her the drinks and she paid. “Yesterday, you say?” she said. “Any idea what time?”
“Well,” said the barman, scratching his bald head. “At a guess, it’d probably be about the time the bloke who was driving it came in.” The farm laborers snickered.
Ah, thought Annie, a true Yorkshire wit. This area had a surfeit of them, if Drury and Hackett were anything to go by. Must be something in the water. Or the beer.
“Did he look anything like this?” Annie asked, taking Wyman’s photograph from her briefcase.
The bartender scrutinized it. “Aye,” he said finally. “I’d say he looked a lot like that, yes.”
“So this was the man?”
The barman grunted.
“I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?” Annie said. “What time was he here?”
“About seven o’clock Sunday evening.”
Annie remembered that Carol had told her the matinee finished at half past four. It certainly didn’t take two and a half hours to get from Eastvale to here, so he must have been somewhere else first, maybe just driving around aimlessly, unless the MI6 pair had been chasing him. “How long did he stay?” she asked.
“Two drinks.”
“How long’s that?”
“Depends on how long a man takes to drink them.”
Winsome leaned over the bar. “Would you prefer to shut the place up and come to Eastvale to answer these questions? Because that can be arranged, you know.”
That shocked him. The farm laborers laughed, and he blushed. “Hour and a half, maybe.”
“What state of mind was he in?” Annie asked.
“How would I know?”
“Try to remember. Was he upset, jolly, aggressive? Did he appear flustered? What?”
“Just kept himself to himself, like. Sat in the corner over there and drank quietly.”
“What else was he doing? Did he have a book? A newspaper? A mobile? Magazine?”
“Nowt. He just sat there. Like he was thinking or something.”
“So he was thinking?”
“Looked like that to me.”
“How would thee know, tha’s never done it,” said one of the farmhands. The other laughed. Winsome shot him a warning glance, and they shifted uneasily on their feet.
“Did he say anything?” Annie asked. “Did he talk to you or anyone else at all?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t with anyone?”
“I already said he was sat by himself.”
“Did anyone come in and talk to him?”
“No.”
“What about after he’d gone? Did anyone come looking for him, asking about him?”
“Only thee.”
“Did you see where he went when he left?”
“How could I? I was working behind the bar. You can’t see the road from here.”
“Okay,” said Annie. “Any idea where he might have gone?”
“How would I know?”
“Guess,” Annie said. “Is there anywhere near here a traveler might go and spend the night, for example?”
“Well, there’s a youth hostel up the lane.”
“There’s Brierley Farm, too, Charlie, don’t forget,” said one of the farmhands.
“Brierley Farm?”
“Aye. They converted the barn for bed-and-breakfast a couple of years ago. It’s half a mile back toward Kinsbeck. You can’t miss it. Big sign outside.”
“Anything else?”
“Not nearby. Not that you’d leave your car here and walk to.”
“He’d run out of petrol,” Annie said.
“Bert’s garage closes at five o’clock on a Sunday,” said the barman, “so he’d have no joy there.”
At that moment the door opened and everyone looked around again.
“Oh, how jolly,” muttered Annie to Winsome. “It’s Dreary and Hackneyed again.”
“That’s Drury and Hackett to you, ma’am,” said one of them, with a weighty pause before the “ma’am.”
“Any luck?” she asked.
“No. He wasn’t there. They were closed, anyway.”
“Right,” said Annie, finishing her Coke. “I think it’s a bit late to start sending out the search parties on the moors tonight, but we can make a start by doing a house-to-house of the area—the youth hostel and Brierley Farm being first on our list. All right, lads?”
“But we’ve got our patrol route to cover,” one of the officers protested.
“Want me to clear it with your superior?” Annie asked.
“No,” the officer mumbled. “Don’t bother. Come on, Ken,” he said to his partner. “Let’s start with Brierley.”
If truth be told, Banks probably hadn’t been fit to drive, he thought as he pulled up outside his Gratly cottage at some ungodly hour in the morning. But all he knew was that he couldn’t stay in London. After he had tossed his pay-as-you-go mobile into the Thames, he felt that he had to get away.
The drive home hadn’t gone too badly. He had wanted loud, raucous sixties rock and roll, not mournful torch ballads, so he set his Led Zeppelin collection on random. The first track that came on was “Dazed and Confused,” which just about said it all. The rest of the drive had passed in a sort of aural slide show of guitar solos, memories and surges of anger alternating with resignation. He was probably lucky to be alive, though, he thought. He didn’t really remember the M1 at all now, just the loud music and a swirling haze of red brake lights ahead and the glaring headlights coming toward him on the other side.
As he drove, he second-guessed himself, told himself he should have gone over to Sophia and her friend in the wine bar, should have confronted them on the doorstep, punched the bloke on the nose. Too late for all of that. He had done nothing, and this was where it had led him.
He had also tried to convince himself that it was all innocent, just a drink with an old friend, but there had been something about the body language, the ease between them, the chemistry, that he just didn’t believe it, and he couldn’t shake the images of Sophia in bed with the young man, the bed where they slept, with the semicircular stained-glass panel above the window and the net curtains fluttering in the breeze.
When he finally shut the door behind him, he felt exhausted, wrung out, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to get to sleep. Instead of trying, he poured himself a large glass of wine and, without turning any lights or music on, went to sit in the conservatory.
So this was how it felt to have your heart broken, he thought. And, damn it, it really did feel like something was broken. He could feel the pieces inside him grating against one another. It had been so long that he had forgotten the sensation. Annie hadn’t broken it when they split up, only bruised it a bit. He and Michelle had simply drifted apart. No, the last time he had felt anywhere near like this was when Sandra had left him. He put his feet up and took a deep breath, reached for the bottle on the table at his side and refilled his glass. He hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, and his stomach growled, but he couldn’t be bothered to go and see if there was anything in the fridge. He didn’t think there was, anyway. It didn’t matter. Rain pattered on the glass. The wine would soon take the edge off his appetite, and if he drank enough he would find sleep. Or oblivion.
19
“So just what the bloody hell is going on?” Superintendent Gervaise asked Banks in her office on Tuesday morning at an “informal” meeting over coffee. The rain was still pouring down, Derek Wyman was still missing, and Banks’s head was pounding. Oblivion had finally come to him in the wee hours of the morning, but not before he had downed enough red wine to give him a headache even extra-strength paracetamol couldn’t touch.